Deadly Remains by Kate Ellis

Deadly Remains is the latest Wesley Peterson novel by Kate Ellis, published last year. This lengthy series benefits from a pleasant setting on and around the south Devon coast, with Tradmouth (which stands in for Dartmouth, as Morbay and Neston stand in for Torquay and Totnes in the series) as the focal point, and the base for Wesley and his friend and boss, the Scouser Gerry Heffernan.

Kate's books invariably showcase intricate plotting, something which has drawn me to them since I first got to know her late in the 90s. Like me, she was a big fan of Glenn Chandler's scripts for the early series of Taggart and her storytelling shares with Glenn's a knack for taking disparate plot ingredients and blending them together into a satisfyingly mysterious meal. There is often - though not in this particular storyline - an element of the macabre that adds a tasty seasoning of the weird and unorthodox

The Wesley books follow a tried and tested pattern. They always combine a mystery set in the past, usually told through a diary or recovered documentation of some kind, frequently unearthed by archaeologist Neil Watson, and a puzzle of the present. In Deadly Remains, the body count is high; however, this is not in any way a gruesome novel (or even, in any meaningful sense, a police procedural), but rather a well-crafted traditional detective story.

Here the death of a writer and researcher with plenty of ghostwritten books on his CV is investigated by Wesley, while bones are unearthed in a dig by Neil's team, which is supplemented in this case by young Michael Peterson, whose role in the story is especially well-handled. The mystery in the past involves a plane crash during the Second World War. 

This aspect of the story reminded me of Fetch Out No Shroud by Stephen Murray (the pen-name of Stephen Hayes), a friend of mine who published some good traditional mysteries with the Collins Crime Club in the 80s and 90s (that book appeared in 1990) and who was already well-established when I first got published. He appeared to me to be destined for crime writing stardom. Alas, Stephen hasn't published a novel for upwards of thirty years, but his novel - which involves a body found on an airfield and the death of a war historian investigating dark secrets of the past - is one I enjoyed. I don't recall the details of the plot, but even though I found a rather brutal online review of it from Publishers' Weekly, I still think it would be worth seeking out. Stephen is one of many writers whose talent, I felt, deserved greater success and a longer career than he was able to achieve.